Re: New draft of section 5.5

"its meaning should be obtained from that definition instead of from
the httpRange-14 rule regarding information resources."
- I invoke the "IR reference rule" in the document, and it can be hyperlinked.
  (Actually the httpRange-14 rule as we know is wrong in all sorts of
ways to referring to it directly is very risky.  E.g. we know the
purpose isn't to say that the URI refers to *any* information
resource, i.e. it has nothing to do with typing; it really means to
say - and I think most people have understood it to say - that it
refers to a *particular* information resource.)

"Because of the 200 status code, Bob applies the httpRange-14 rule and
concludes the following:"

It doesn't matter how Bob concludes that metadata, but it would be
harmful to say that a single HTTP response is adequate to justify it;
for the metadata to be useful it has to be true of what someone who
reads Bob's metadata will get. I think it is better to be vague since
this has nothing to do with this section.

"web:hasUri"  -- the document already defines the predicate (if it's
the one I think you mean) and it's called :accessibleVia.  There is no
reason to say that the subject has an information resource type and
doing so weakens the document.

Bob actually concludes that the URI refers to the IR at that URI. It
is better to say this in English since in the example he really does
conclude this. If written in RDF it will have to be translated for the
benefit of readers, and that's redundant.

I don't see any reason to go into such detail on what Carol wants to
do. Most of the detail you've provided is unnecessary and distracting.
She really just needs to figure out what was meant by each use of the
URI.

Carol's problem is *not* caused by combining the graphs - it is caused
by Alice and Bob using the same URI in different ways. She would have
to figure out what they mean even if she didn't do any graph
combining, if she processed the two graphs separately. In particular
she'd be confused about whether to apply the IR reference rule or not,
in either case.

The rest seems at best unnecessary to me; and as you know I find your
"application" idea to be wrong and harmful as meaning is not a
function of application. Cases in which there is no problem due to
some coincidence are uninteresting and don't need to be presented.

I had been focusing on how to construct an RDF satisfying
interpretation (i.e. proof of soundness) in this case, but I think
this is a secondary problem. The first thing is to figure out how
Carol would reconstruct the intent, in the best of circumstances. If
she can do this then I'm sure there'd be some clever formal
construction leading to an interpretation. If there weren't, well,that
would make the case against this approach quite a bit stronger, but
saying so doesn't help in presenting this option, and the first
responsibility here is to give it a fair shake - we're not obligated
to analyze it in detail, and doing so might even hurt socially.

Remember this document is meant to bring people into conversation
about issue 57. By going on and on we'd only scare people away. For
this section, the people to be engaged would be Harry and Ed Summers
and others who think this way. They are not formalists and already
have little patience with careful analysis. They should not be
bombarded with details.

The presentation has to be as brief as possible - just long enough to
enable them to recognize that this is the solution that they're
proposing, while allowing us to describe the solution in terms used
elsewhere in the document to make comparisons possible.

As I said I rewrote 5.5 last week. I just now fixed a couple of
problems with and have tried to fix up a couple of things that might
have confused you.

Jonathan

Received on Monday, 4 April 2011 20:37:38 UTC